Yesterday John Podesta, the president’s senior adviser, released a highly anticipated report addressing how the administration should tackle the challenges of big data in coming years. So how’d he do? Pretty well, actually. The report recognizes some important new realities and recommends some positive policy solutions for “a world of near-ubiquitous data collection where that data is being crunched at a speed increasingly approaching real-time.”

“In the nearly two decades since the Commission first began to examine data brokers, little progress has been made to improve transparency and choice.”
- Conclusion, Federal Trade Commission Report, A Call for Transparency…

The Department of Commerce has convened a “multistakeholder process” between civil society groups (like the ACLU) and industry groups, with the aim of limiting face recognition as a tool of surveillance in our society by establishing common ground…

In the wake of the NSA scandals and daily corporate privacy invasions, the president asked one of his senior advisors, John Podesta, to perform a quick 90-day review of “big data” (corporate jargon for privacy) and lay out what next steps his administration…